As soldiers and indigenous men worked in the Colombian jungle to find a downed plane with kids, they say one ceremonial method helped in their quest.
The weary Indigenous men gathered at their base camp, nestled among towering trees and dense vegetation that form a disorienting sea of green. They sensed that their ancestral land — Selva Madre, or Mother Jungle — was unwilling to let them find the four children who'd been missing since their charter plane crashed weeks earlier in a remote area in southern Colombia.
Henry Guerrero, a volunteer who joined the search from the children's home village near Araracuara, told The Associated Press his aunt prepared the yagé for the group. They believed it would induce visions that could lead them to the children. Lesly, 13, was the mature, quiet one. Soleiny, 9, was playful, and Tien, nearly 5 before the crash, restless. Cristin, 11 months then, was just learning to walk.
He said he left Mucutuy $9 million Colombian pesos, about $2,695 U.S. dollars, before leaving to pay for food, other necessities and the charter flight. He wanted the children out of the village because he feared they could be recruited by one of the rebel groups in the area. Sixteen days after the crash, with morale running low among all search parties, searchers found the wreckage. The plane appeared to have nosedived — it was was found in a vertical, nose-down position.
“We moved on, to a second phase,” 1st Vice Sgt. Juan Carlos Rojas Sisa said. “We went from the stealth part to the noise part so that they could hear us.” Some searchers had already walked more than 930 miles — the distance between Lisbon and Paris, or Dallas and Chicago. Exhaustion was setting in, and the military implemented a plan to rotate soldiers.On day 40, after Elder Rubio took the yagé, the searchers combed the rainforest again, starting from the site where they found the diapers. His vision had reignited hopes but provided no specifics on where the children might be. Groups fanned out in different directions.
A helicopter lifted the kids out of the dense forest. They were first flown to San José del Guaviare and then to the capital, Bogota, each with a team of health care professionals. They were covered in foil blankets and hooked to IV lines due to dehydration. Their hands and feet showed scratches and insect bites.
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